


There As I Flew

by Heptapora



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Death Fic, Grief/Mourning, Other, Post episode 68
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-29
Packaged: 2018-08-17 00:06:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8122876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heptapora/pseuds/Heptapora
Summary: How do you, Vox Machina, want to do this? / The members of Vox Machina in the aftermath of their loss. Grief, anger- And at the end of it all, maybe a little bit of hope.





	1. Keyleth

**Author's Note:**

> This is the start of a six-chapter fic that, if everything goes well, will be updated daily right up through Thursday, with a final chapter posted before the next episode airs. Here's to Vox Machina, and to Percy.

Keyleth stands at the bow of the ship.

She’s been there for hours, straight-backed and still, and the wind has long since whipped her hair into a mass of furious snarls, blasted her eyes dusty-dry. If she tries, she can almost pretend it’s beaten the feeling from her skin, too- Can almost pretend that’s the only reason she’s numb. She’s clutching Per— _The_ gun. She’s clutching the gun, Retort, against her stomach, but she can only really be sure when she looks down and sees it in her hands. She tightens her grip, and even as she watches her fingers dig in she doesn't feel a thing, detached from them as if they belong to a stranger. Her knuckles bleach white with the force, her fingernails scraping over the embedded white stones, gouging into the cracks between...and something about that prickles at her, jogs her out of her stupor. There’s a thought, there. There’s a memory there. He had said—  
  
_I live as long as Whitestone lives._  
  
The sudden recollection of his voice feels like being run through, like a white-hot blade punching through the ice in her chest, turning her from freezing to burning so fast she can feel herself crack. She hears, ‘I live as long as Whitestone lives’, and she looks down at the rocks studding the metal, and she thinks of the town that owes them its name, and she _tries_ , with all her might, to understand. She tries to believe him, oh please, please let her believe him— She’d been unable to follow _so much_ of what he said but if she can just have this, if she can have this comfort— If there is _one thing_ in the world that she can will herself to accept—  
  
The gun is inert in her hands. The stones beneath her nails are dead things, useless chunks of earth. There is nothing of Percy here. And miles, lifetimes away- There’s more white stone. There’s a town made on the stuff, made of the stuff, and without him it’s _meaningless_. It’s bullshit, it’s _things_ — Things don’t live. Whitestone doesn’t ‘live’. It never did. _Percy_ lived.

And now he is gone, and there is nothing left.

 _Stupid_ , she thinks, because for once it wasn’t her, for once she wasn’t the one being foolish, he was wrong and _she wants to tell him so badly_ —  
  
The fresh wave of grief and rage and hurt takes the breath out of her, and she crumples as surely as if she’s been struck. Her knees hit the wood with a heavy thud, and she wavers there a second, unsteady- Then sinks down the rest of the way, and she arranges herself there clumsily, gathers her heavy limbs to her body and hunches over, curling into herself. She bows her head to the gun- The gun, Percy’s gun, the stupid, stupid thing- and presses her forehead into the rigid metal, hard, until she can finally, finally feel it.

(And still, there is nothing there.)  
  
Time stopped mattering ages ago; She couldn’t say how long she huddles there, eyes shut, shaking apart. When an interruption finally comes in the form of a touch at her back, she jolts, scrambling to turn around. Distantly, she’s aware of an elbow bashing against the railing of the ship, but it doesn't hurt.  
  
Her vision is blurry, but she still knows Vax kneeling in front of her. He’d startled at the same time she had; His hand is half-withdrawn, and he watches her with lips parted, that look of fathomless sympathy on his face.  
  
“I’m sorry-“ she rasps. Her voice is hoarse, and quiet, and she sounds desperate even to herself. She hadn’t realized it was possible for Vax to look more concerned, but now he does, reaching for her again, leaning in towards her.  
  
“Kiki,” he murmurs- Low and soothing, the way she’s heard people talk to nervous animals. His hand settles carefully, carefully over her own, wrapped tight around the handle of the Retort. “Kiki, for what?”  
  
“I didn’t mean to make so much noise, I just.. Everything is..“  
  
Vax is quiet for a long moment at that, looking like she’s lost him somewhere. Then, slowly, he says, “Keyleth...you haven’t made a sound for hours.”  
  
And now it’s her turn to be puzzled, because how can that be?  
  
She’d been sure she was screaming.


	2. Grog

Grog sits in a cabin below the deck.  
  
(Somewhere, on the other side of the door, there is a body.)  
  
It's a small space, not made for someone of his stature, and it's dim. There's a light he could switch on, if he wanted- but it wouldn't chase the shadows away, so he doesn't bother.  
  
(He knows because he carried it here himself. He carries everything. He's the strongest, he's always been the strongest. But this was a burden he'd wanted to refuse. He hadn't wanted to touch it. Him. The substance of Percy turned so quickly into an uncanny thing without the spirit.)  
  
The airship sails so smooth that down here, it’s easy to forget they’re even moving. It's quiet, too- interior quiet, tight-space-muffled-quiet.  
  
(Touching made it too real, and he'd been overwhelmingly afraid that he would hurt him, as if he could ever be hurt any worse. Still, the body felt so light and fragile. Like a paper shell. A husk. He'd taken such care when he lifted it... )

(Grog knows bodies. Grog's life is full of bodies, but Percy isn't supposed to be a body. It makes the whole thing different.)  
  
The only thing he hears is his breathing, air heaving heavy in and out, in and out, dragging on his lips and whistling in his nostrils. The sound, so loud in this little box, so constant, is slowly but surely driving him wild.  
  
(Percy's chest didn't stir the whole way back to the ship. It was wrong, wrong, wrong.)

(Percy wasn't supposed to be so still.)

He tries holding his breath for a moment, just to stop the sound.

(It makes him feel dead.)

He breathes again.  
  
His hands wring the handle of his axe, and for a split second the creak gives him some distraction, some whisper of relief. He'd have more room without the weapon slung across his knees, grazing the walls on both ends, but he can't stand to put it down. Without the familiar weight of it to anchor him, he would burst out of his skin- Even if there's no use for it here. Even if this is a foe he can't cut down. Not now.  
  
(He would have stayed and chopped at Ripley for hours if he could. No amount of dead is enough for the nasty bitch.)  
  
(Maybe, if he'd used his axe better, sooner...)  
  
(Maybe, if he were stronger...)

(He should have cut her down. He needs no magic, he needs nothing but his strength, and _he should have been able to cut her down_.)

If there were something to hit, this would be easier. He knows it wouldn't fix his problems, there's no amount of violence that will beat back the clock, but at least it would give him something to _do_ , something to shut out the-- The _noise_ in his head. But there's no cargo on board. There's nothing to smash, and nowhere to run. He would ask Scanlan for the mansion, for the training room with the sandbags and the dummies all lined up in a row, to rage against- And the kitchen, too, and the dining room, and the sitting room, and the servants, and _every-fucking-thing_ \- if...he felt like he could. He keeps thinking about it, and he keeps fidgeting, and _wanting_ it, but that's as far as he gets. He can't ask. He can't look at him. At any of them.

(He can't admit to himself that the feeling pinning him down is 'shame'.)

(Shame for his failures. Shame for his fear. Shame for his weakness.)

(Shame for the way he doesn't want to look at the body. Grog Strongjaw isn't afraid of a little dead body, damn it.)

(Grog Strongjaw will never tell anyone he is hiding.)

So instead, he sits, and he squeezes at the handle of his axe, sometimes, and he grits his teeth, sometimes. He scowls and he squirms, and he breathes-breathes-breathes. Feeling rises up in him like a tidal wave, sometimes, scorching his throat, tasting of bile on the back of his tongue, and he thinks he might not be able to hold in the shout-- And then it ebbs again, and there's no outlet for this, there's nothing to do but sit. And wait. And breathe.

Breathe.

(This can't be happening.)

Breathe.

(He didn't stop it.)

Breathe.

(Why couldn't he stop it?)

Breathe.

( _The world doesn't make sense_.)

...Breathe.


	3. Vax

Vax leans outside a cracked door.

Inside his head, there is a constant count of the moments they’ve been in the air, the moments until they land, the moments until their journey is through. From the Island of Glass to the shore of Marquette. From the shore of Marquette to a tree with enough life left in it for Keyleth to weave into a spell. From the tree to Whitestone.

If he had an hourglass, he’d measure the time by single grains of sand.

He doesn’t. Instead he busies himself as best he can aboard the airship. He holds Keyleth when she’ll let him, squeezing her tight, clutching the jagged pieces of her together so she won’t fall apart. He tries to coax her into laying down when she won’t. Sometimes it works. The first time it does, he slips the Retort deftly from her hands and, after a little bit of fumbling with the mechanisms, unloads it. After, he slides it back into her grasp. She hasn’t wanted to put it down, and she doesn’t need to know she has, even in her sleep. But he’ll feel much better about the way she squeezes it now that he knows there’s no way it can go off.

He puts the bullets into his pocket, and when there’s nothing else to do with his hands he shuffles them, over and over each other, like a worry stone. When he prays to the Raven Queen, they become his rosary, every piece of metal a plea. They’re warm from his touch as often as not, the exact temperature of his skin.

He flutters from person to person, Keyleth-Scanlan-Grog, chasing the strongest scent of grief, the highest pitch of crisis, pressing his hands over the holes in their family like staunching the flow of blood from wounds. And constantly, he comes back to where he is now. Every second breath in his rounds finds him on one side of this door or the other, standing watch over Vex, and standing watch over Percy.

It was Captain Damon’s room on the other side of the wall. It’s also the biggest, and the safest, so now it is Percy’s. He’d be satisfied with that if he knew, he thinks. He could get well and truly uppity about ousting the captain from his own quarters. De Rolo himself is laid out on the bed, cocooned in spells- Anything they’d had to preserve him, things that helped and things that probably didn’t, things they had to try, anyway. He’s cleaner than he was on the Island, and draped in a soft blanket from the chin down, covering up the parts of his body that had been left too wet, too collapsed, too broken. It would be absurd to say he could be sleeping. He most definitely is not sleeping. But he doesn’t look as bad as he could, anyway. They’d been able to do that for him, at the very least.

Vex is almost as still as the body. She hasn’t left Percy’s side. Not on the island, not on the way back to the ship, and not now. He holds her, too, and unlike Keyleth she’ll always let him. Sometimes, she leans into him, knots her fingers up in his, and sometimes when he puts his arms around her it sets her to weeping. Other times, she just feels…distant, drifting further in her grief than his arms can reach. 

When he thinks she needs it, he gives her space, and that’s when he posts himself outside the room rather than in, listening from a distance. Lingering idle by the door, guarding her- Guarding _them_ , against he knows not what, against whatever he can- This is where he prays, and he thinks.

Mostly, he thinks about all the things he has to say to de Rolo.

He had always meant to forgive him.

Really forgive him, truly forgive him. The thing their relationship had become- That stilted thing, that awkward thing that had crackled with Vax’s temper and blame when they touched, that isn’t what he wanted. That isn’t what he’d ever meant to _leave_ it at. The absolution sat, ready and waiting, tucked away on a shelf in his heart from the very beginning; He’d held their relationship like a breath, but he’d never discarded it. Not even close. He had always meant to _forgive_ him, he’d just been…putting it off. Waiting until he _felt more like it_ , waiting until he felt generous enough to give the thing Percy had earned and earned and earned.

He can’t believe he was ever naive enough to think they had time for that, to think there would always be a ‘tomorrow’ waiting. And he prays, sitting on a ship with the dead body of the man who may as well be his brother, sitting on a ship with Kynan, that no one he loves will ever treat him so unkindly over his own mistakes. That no one will ever be as petty towards him as he has been. He regrets, and he repents.

And he vows that he will tell him so.

From the island to Marquette. From Marquette to a tree. From a tree to Whitestone. From there to Pike, to Gilmore, to Allura, to someone who can reach through the veil between life and death and drag Percy _back_. He will tell Percy he forgives him when he wakes up.

And until then, that is the only way he can think of it. He will wake up. He has to. This can’t be how they end.


	4. Scanlan

Scanlan sits on the deck with Cabal’s Ruin spread across his lap.

The wood is uncomfortably hard beneath him, and he’d be lying if he said he was sure sitting under so much open, dark sky with a Vestige slung across his knees is totally safe. But the air inside is stagnant, sticking in his throat and weighing down his hands. At least out here, in the wind, he can breathe.

The cloak is big enough on him to make a fair blanket. It would be cozy if the chill weren’t coming from inside of him rather than out, if it didn’t smell like powder and death. 

He puts his hands on the cloth, and he focuses. He feels nothing.

He takes a deep breath, lifts his hands away, and closes his eyes for a moment…then puts them back down again, and _focuses_. This time, it shudders under his palms, and he thinks he’s made some headway, uncovered some secret of its function. Then he realizes that the rest of him is shuddering, too, along with the deck beneath him. The ship has hit some rough patch of air, and momentarily, the turbulence subsides. The cloak is lifeless.

He digs his fingers in, and finally he tries spelling it too, snapping magic against the surface like the crack of a whip. Briefly, the patch of deck where he sits lights up blue, and something happens, but it’s gone again before he can tell what precisely the cloak has done, and he bares his teeth into the returning dark, a snarl of frustration where no one else can see. His fingernails gouge at the fabric, and his head drops- All of him curving low over the thing that cost them Percy’s life, the thing he hasn’t been able to understand any better since, no matter how he keeps trying. His best efforts aren’t enough, it seems. He isn’t a sharp enough spellcaster, and he can only work with what he has. With what he is. He thinks, _Tiberius could have done this._ Maybe he could have saved their human, too- But they are slowly but surely running out of hands to beat back the dark.

Grief snatches at his next breath, rattling it in his chest, and for a moment, with no witnesses to his weakness, he lets himself give in to it, lets go of the sob clawing its way up his throat, then another, and another, his whole body convulsing with the force of them. Scanlan sobs bitterly for Percy, for Tiberius, sobs open-mouthed and wounded for how hard he tried to match Ripley, how _ferociously_ he tried, and how little it mattered. Forever too little, forever too late.

He thinks of Vax asking him how he keeps smiling, and he wants to find him and apologize for the misplaced confidence. He wants to say, _Because that is all I have. Because I am an empty promise._

He does not. By the time someone approaches him to tell him the ship is descending, his throat is raw but his eyes are dry, his pain shoved back down deep inside of him. He does not weep as he watches Keyleth stagger through her spell, in shambles, nearly dropping the thread of it before she is done. He does not scream as the watches the twins flank the body of Percy through the wooden tunnel, like silent dark birds hovering over a funeral procession. He does not fall to the ground when he looks at Grog, and sees his broad shoulders tremble. He will not add to their grief. He can think of words for them, for certain, because he can _always_ think of words. But they’re stupid words, empty words, too small and too flimsy to patch over their wounds.

On the other side, the sight of Pike nearly rends him in two. 

Something that feels very like relief, very like hope buoys him up, because if anyone can make this right, if anyone can make these mistakes right, it is Pike who never falls short, Pike who soothes his heart- And a split second later, the guilt and the shame drag him back down again, tear at him as he watches her relief turn to horror, as he watches her realize that something is very, very wrong. As he watches her realize the scope of the tragedy he is laying at her feet.

He wants to say, _I’m sorry I let you believe in me._

He wants to say, _I’m sorry I couldn’t take better care of our children._

Instead, he turns his face away, slumping under the weight of his shame, and he doesn’t say anything at all.


	5. Pike

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tonight's update is late but long! If you've been keeping up with the chapter numbers, you'll also see that chapter 6, still intended to the be the last, will in fact be going up tomorrow, not Thursday. Whoops.

Pike stares at a cold body.

For a moment she is paralyzed by her horror, and all she can think is, _again_. She has to see the face of someone she loves turned so still and so wrong, _again_ , she has to do this,  _again,_ she  _never wants to do this again._ It only gets harder every time, carves deeper into old scars, rending the heart of her _again_ and _again_ and _again_. No one should have to do this. No one should have to live their life feeling death bearing down on them the way Vox Machina does. The way she does.

Eventually, she realizes someone is speaking. Tearing her eyes away from Percy’s face feels like ripping herself free of a cold, sucking current.

“-something. You can, can’t you? You can bring him back.” Looking at Vax isn’t much easier; She could drown in the desperation she sees in his eyes. Her gaze flickers away; Beside him, Vex is pale and still. Keyleth wavers on her feet and Grog looks like a hurricane crammed into a glass vial, a disaster waiting to happen. Scanlan is refusing to look at her, all wilted with a bundle of heavy cloth bunched up in his arms. She keeps her eyes fixed on him the longest, hoping he’ll look back at her, hoping he’ll acknowledge her somehow, as she stands on the precipice of _what everyone needs from her_. He does not.

So she looks back to Vax, and she says, “I can tr—“ And then she stops, and shuts her eyes, and pulls in a sharp breath. There is no room for ‘try’ here. She will not crumble under the weight of this. When she opens her eyes again, her vision is misty, but what she says instead is, simply, “I can.”

Once the tears start, they don't stop; They fall the whole time she is preparing, a constant warmth on her cheeks, a ticklish, irritating pooling around her nose and in her lashes. She pays them no mind save for an impatient swipe of her hand when they gather too heavily over her eyes, doing her very best to ignore them as she asks, “How long?” and “How?” and “Who?”

The broken account of the fight, of Ripley and Orthax and all that horror, gives her pause. For a split second, her hands still. “…I should have been there,” she breathes. And then, before anyone has time to answer, her expression hardens, and she says, more firmly, “I’m here now.”

She will hone her despair to a cutting edge, and she will wield it against the darkness that reaches out to tear her family from her arms.

When she is ready to cast her spell, Percy is laid out in the castle. It looks like a funeral.

The blanket draped across him is finer than the one they’d brought him in with, and his arms are arranged neatly at his sides. The members of Vox Machina linger around, and the sole member of his blooded family, too. Pike doesn’t allow herself to stop and study her for long, but from the glimpses she gets, she thinks Cassandra looks…hollow. Kima, standing at the fringes of the crowd, knots her hands together in front of her, lips pinched and nostrils flared, tense as a coiled spring. Allura is closer, and while Pike watches, she reaches out with a gentle hand and smooths the hair back from Percy’s forehead. She can’t see the other woman’s expression from here, but the gesture is tender. Gilmore has been running himself ragged keeping up the barrier; He looks half-dead himself, despite everything Pike has done for him. Still, he stands tall, and there is a deep, deep weariness in his eyes, but a keenness, too. Kash’s face is all tense lines. At his side, Zahra’s lip quivers; Every so often, she takes in a deep, trembling gulp of air. Her hands on both of Kashaw’s shoulders dig into the cloth of his shirt. Eventually, he takes one of them, raises it to his lips and holds it there.

The only thing they’re missing, then, are the offerings to aid in her spell, beacons to guide Percy home.

The rest of them are familiar with this ritual, but Cassandra needs an explanation. When she gets one, she’s the first to offer, departing mutely from the room and returning with a fistful of cloth. It’s only when she tucks it gingerly against Percy’s side that Pike realizes what it is: A toy bear.

“I never let him touch it,” Cassandra explains dully, folding her arms and stepping back. “When we were young. I told him… I told him he would stain it, with his dirty hands.” The whole room is quiet in the moment that comes after, until she adds, so softly that Pike barely hears, “…He can have it.”

Vax steps forward next, so quick to act that Pike thinks he must have been waiting for this from the start. With nimble fingers he unfastens the metal bird’s skull Percy once crafted for him, laying it on the very center of the dead man’s chest. “Make me a new one, Percival,” he murmurs, smoothing the cloth down around the bauble with both hands before he draws away.

Keyleth brushes past her immediately after, and she’s steadier on her feet than Pike has seen her since she arrived, fresh purpose in the hands that rise to her head and lift her headpiece free. She lays it atop the body, just beneath the metal skull, fussing with it until it lays just so. “It’s just a thing,” she says. No one would dare question her; Pike thinks the explanation is directed more at Percival, anyway. “It’s just a thing. I would rather have y…” She chokes on that last word, then, and steps back. Vax’s waiting arm curls around her, and he leans in, presses a kiss to the side of her bowed head.

From somewhere to her right, Pike hears a soft cry. Hers isn’t the only head that turns, startled and more than a little concerned, and she sees that Vex seems to have finally woken from her daze. Her expression is pained, her hand outstretched. An instant later, she seems to realize she’s made a sound, and she brings her hand in, curls it unsteadily against her chest. “…I wanted to,” she murmurs. “I wanted…” She blinks, a heavy fluttering of her eyelids- And then swears, and paces forward, reaching over her shoulder to tug her coveted broom from her back.

“Vex…” Pike says, gently; The other woman doesn’t so much as look up. She’s crossed the distance to the body with great purpose, and then halted suddenly, lingering over the body like she isn’t sure where the broom should go. “Vex,” Pike tries, again- And this time, she does look up. Her eyes had been so distant; Now, they are wild. Hard to meet. “Vex, I can only take three,” she points out, gently. “Any more won’t make a difference.”

Vex lingers there, the broom clasped in both hands- Then turns away again, and lays it out at Percy’s side, anyway. “I don’t care,” she says, her voice shaking. Pike takes a breath to argue, hesitates on the realization that she has no idea what to say, and, “I don’t _care_ ,” Vex repeats, again.

“You know what? Fuck it.” That’s Grog, provoked suddenly into motion, and his voice is rough, face twisted up in a grimace. He’s rummaging for something; Two unfamiliar bottles, yanked from the Bag of Holding. “She’s right. _Fuck_. _It_. We got this far on our own terms, taking care of our own business. We’re not about to let some fussy spell start bossing us now.” He sets the bottles by Percy’s head; They _clink_ together softly. One tips forward, leaning against his hair. “Sandkeg’s the best I’ve got, motherfucker. Better come back here and get it.”

“…Yeah. Fuck it,” Scanlan echoes, but it isn’t half as forceful as the way Grog had said it. He pads forward last, and tucks a short length of wood in next to the broom. “…A trade,” he says. His voice is unsteady in a way Pike’s never quite heard it before. “I want an upgrade, actually. Fireball wand for a pistol.” His smile is forced; His lips tremble. He reaches up and drags the back of his hand against his nose. “I’ll just.. Wait right here, for you to tell me no. Alright?”

The silence that follows is expectant. Pike inhales, but she can find no air, suddenly, to fill her lungs; The weight of all the eyes on her should surely crush her flat.

She manages to reach out and take one of Percy’s limp hands, anyway. The other comes up to clasp her holy symbol, squeezing tight, and there's comfort in the familiar shape. She focuses.. Shuts her eyes… And _pleads._ When she opens them again, the body, the onlookers- All of them are gone. Instead, she sees light. White light, and she can feel a wave of energy racing through her, lifting her up. With all her might, she thinks, _Percy_ , and with all her heart, she _yearns_ for him…and out of the dazzling brightness ahead of her, a familiar shape begins to emerge. Dizzy with relief, she stretches her arms out towards him…

…And they do not reach. He stands beyond her fingertips, miles out from her, and suddenly she has no idea how she could have thought him close enough to touch. But it doesn’t make sense- She sees him, she _feels_ him. In the not-place her magic has brought her to, and in the corporeal castle where her body still sits, she opens her mouth, and she calls, “Percy?”

“Why are you so far away..?”


	6. Vex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is closer to the length of the rest of the fic over again than the length of any other chapter. It's also the last- It's been a Trip. If you want to run me down, I'm @asspostate on tumblr. <3 have fun!

Vex doesn’t understand what’s happening.

It’s hard to look directly at Pike, lit up the way she is. Her eyes are pools of gleaming white, and trying to see her face past the glow is like trying to find the edges of the sun. She struggles with it, anyway, grimacing and fighting to make out her expression until she can’t see anything but spots. When she finally closes her eyes against the sting, she sees a ghostly afterimage on the backs of her eyelids, a shimmering jack-o-lantern of facial features rimmed in light.

She doesn’t remember being dead. 

Not really. She'd woken up confused at best, not understanding why the mood of the room was so dire. Later, some of the gap had filled in…a little bit. There was…cold, she’d thought. And a feeling she would only be able to understand, eventually, as _depth_ , though she’d be hard pressed to explain that. A feeling like sinking, maybe. Not beneath the earth, but out of it. Slipping free of the physical, and…

Disintegrating.

She’s fairly sure no one spoke to her while she was dead. At least, not in any way that mattered, or that she remembers. She supposes it would be easy to miss something like that, being dead- But she’d seen Pike drag Grog back from the edges of life too, and she hadn’t stopped the ritual to converse with him. That, she knows for certain. She hadn’t stopped the ritual at all. It just…Happened.

So what could possibly be delaying it now? Pike sounds…confused. And worried. ( _Scared_ , she thinks, but that could be her projecting. Everything has sounded scared to Vex for a while now- Distant conversations, the wind in the trees, the creak of door hinges and the blood rushing in her ears. Fear-fear-fear.)

There’s a moment of stillness and silence, of collectively held breath, like they’re all waiting for Percival to sit up, anyway. He doesn’t. 

“What’s happening?” she demands, at the same time as Vax pipes up somewhere next to her,

“What’s going on?” and for the length of a syllable they’re in perfect sync before their voices fall away from each other and become discordant. 

“I don’t..” Pike’s voice is distant, and she…Shudders, kind of, but it’s a weird sort of shudder. Vex thinks of horses, jittering their skin to shake off flies. “Why can’t I reach you…? Percy, come here.”

She’s talking to something none of them can see, and it’s maddening, not knowing what’s going on, being powerless to help. Vex wants to shake her, wants to scream- But fear of disrupting her magic stays her hand, locks her voice in her throat. She only realizes she’s leaned over them anyway when she hears a soft sound and looks down to find that her braid has slipped over her shoulder and is coiling dark against the blanket, somewhere by Percy’s hip. 

They aren’t done yet, she thinks. They aren’t _finished yet_. There are too many things left to say, and once the words had felt too heavy for her tongue to push past her lips, but now she knows she was wrong. They aren’t heavy stones, they’re embers. And if he isn’t here to receive them, they will burn through the core of her, through her heart brittle and dry as kindling.

“Percy, come _here_ ,” Pike says again, and this time it’s an order tinged with desperation. 

Something is wrong.

The light in Pike’s eyes flickers-flickers-flickers, like a guttering candle, and something cold and numb creeps up Vex’s legs, up her spine, pools in her stomach and rises suffocating in her throat. She’d think she was dying again, but dying had been easier than this. The icy sludge seeps into her muscles, and she loses her balance, clutches a handful of blanket to stay on her feet, forgetting to be careful. Her cheeks are wet, but she couldn’t say when she started crying. “Don’t,” she whispers, “don’t-don’t-don’t-please-don’t- _Pike_ —“

There’s a rustle behind her, a hint of something vibrantly colored at the edge of her vision, and a blinding flash- Pike lights up like the sun again, gasping ragged, her back curving like a strung bow. Vex twists clumsily, follows the hand on the back of the cleric’s neck to the line of a violet sleeve, follows the sleeve up, up to the face of Gilmore, pale and grimacing. When he meets her eye, he tries a smile, but it’s brittle.

“I figured I’d chip in,” he says, almost lighthearted, just for a second. “Can’t have you leaving me out.”

“…It isn’t working,” Vex breathes, hoarse. “Why isn’t it working?” Behind him, there is.. Motion. Conversation, maybe. She isn’t sure.

“You’d know the answer better than I would. Would he want it to?”

“Would who— What..?”

“Would he want to come back.”

Vex’s mouth opens to say, _of course_ , her eyes widening indignantly, because _who wouldn’t want to come back?_ But the words stop in her throat. She thinks of Percy, _I’ve just had a terrible thought…_

_Because it is my job to have terrible thoughts…_

…forever holding himself to his flaws, both real and imagined, like pressing his hands stubbornly to an iron, branding himself ever deeper. She thinks of the sense she got, sometimes, when they were still and close, that the inside of his head was never truly quiet, didn’t know how to be quiet.

She thinks of all the times she imagined she could hear him eating himself alive, chewing himself apart from the inside out.

“That is the catch,” Gilmore is saying, expression gone gentle and knowing in a way that twists her stomach up in knots. “Tearing an unwilling soul from the afterlife is far, far beyond our little cleric’s capabilities. For many reasons.”

She tastes bile and blood. Percy doesn’t want to come back.

Percy doesn’t want to come back to her.

…

Pike is still lit up. 

Vex looks again from the cleric’s face to Gilmore’s hand. Something is happening here that her grief-stricken mind is… Touching the edges of, feeling out agonizingly slowly. “You kept the spell from going out, didn’t you,” she says. “That’s what that was.” Gilmore smiles.

“Because I know how well you bargain.”

Willing souls and unwilling souls. Somehow, the hope hurts worse than her grief, searing her where she's already battered and sore. She turns back to the body, searching desperately for— What? There’s nothing here to bargain with. Wherever Pike has gone, wherever she has found Percy, it is- _He_ is still entirely out of Vex’ahlia’s reach. Before she has time to ask, she hears Gilmore’s voice at her ear.

“Do hurry.”

A hand lands on her back.. And shoves.

Her world goes white.

 

She tips forward.

She’d been leaning so low over the body that it wouldn’t have taken much to send her sprawling, and distantly she’s aware that she probably landed on Percy and all his gifts. But she loses track of her body before she has time to feel Keyleth’s headdress bite into her stomach, absorbed instead by what’s happening to her— Mind? Her spirit? She isn’t sure what to call it, only knows that there’s a spark at the base of her skull, and an abrupt lurch that’s entirely alien to her. It feels like Gilmore has rattled her insides loose, somehow, and thrust them ahead of her skin, leaving the empty husk behind. And she just keeps going, tumbling into a bizarre, white weightlessness. Head over heels, if she had head or heels. She’s not sure she does any more.

There’s a moment where she slows, gradually, like sliding through water. She thinks she’ll stop…and then she’s caught up again, flung further forward and she has the sense that she’s been…passed, hand over hand, slung deeper into whatever this is. There’s a fleeting impression of Pike, right at the fringe of her awareness.

The second time she slows, she really does stop. She has to try to put her feet down three times before she remembers what feet feel like, but when she finally does, she finds the shape of herself again. There’s no ground beneath her, not really, just a deep white void, but when she concentrates she finds she can stand, anyway.

It feels a little bit like death, here. Like disintegrating. In this not-space, she no longer has hard edges sealing her in, and she knows without a doubt that if she let herself lose her focus, she could just…drift apart.

She pinches herself on the tender inside of her elbow until she can feel it, just in case, and she remembers Gilmore saying, ‘Do hurry.’ She’d thought it was because he couldn’t sustain this forever, but maybe the hurrying is for her benefit, too.

It’s quiet here. Supernaturally quiet, like this is a place that doesn’t know what sound is. The thought of disturbing the perfect silence feels…perilous, like the dread of screaming in a quiet temple multiplied tenfold. The way it might feel if the gods themselves slept just under the floor.

She thinks of Percy…

…and she cups her hands around her mouth, and she screams his name, as fiercely and as defiantly as she can. The thing her voice does here is like an echo turned in on itself; The further the sound drifts from her lips, the longer it goes on, the more she starts to doubt that she’s made a noise at all. So, to be sure, she screams again, howling until her lungs are so empty she imagines she can feel them fold.

She knows the feeling of him before she recognizes the sight.

This recognition, this understanding is profound, deeper than her senses, but if she were to compare it to anything she would say it was like…scent. Not that she smells him, but rather, it stirs a feeling like the one she’d had the first time she’d unstoppered a vial in a shop and realized, suddenly, that the contents were very, if not exactly, like the perfume her mother had worn. It takes her, for a moment, to a different place and a different time entirely, makes her feel safe even as it shreds on her heartstrings. And she _knows_ him, without a doubt. Percy.

Percy stands with her in this nothingness, a little bit blurry around the edges. Her recognition of him is so quick that it actually takes her a second to realize that he doesn’t…look…quite right. It’s Percy, but…his hair is dark. It’s fetching, but she doesn’t understand why his looks should be changed until…oh.

Until she realizes that his looks aren’t changed at all. The way she’d known him, _that_ was Percy changed. This is the way he had been born, and here, in…whatever this place is, in this space beyond life or before death or just…in between, he is restored.

The overwhelming loss, lifted momentarily from her shoulders, crashes back into place. She has a purpose here.

“Percival,” she breathes. “Percival, darling. It’s time to come home.”

He’s surprised, she thinks, to see her; His gaze roams her face, taking her in. But he’s sleepy-eyed and distant, too; She can see this place bleeding into him. Or maybe it’s the substance of him, bleeding out.

Still, it’s his voice that comes out of his mouth, achingly familiar when he says, “Go back, Vex.” The refusal isn’t lost on her; In fact, for a moment it strikes her mute. But when she finds her voice again, she disregards it.

“Yes, let’s,” she says, and she tries to sound firm, but her voice trembles. “It took…A lot of juice, to get me here, and if we dawdle we will wear our spellcasters out.” She can see the question in his expression, curiosity lighting up like a flare, and she thinks he’ll ask what is going on. Then the moment passes, and he shakes his head.

“Vex..” he says, slowly. “Vex’ahlia. I’m not…coming back. And you need to go. You don’t belong here.”

“And neither do you.”

“I died.”

The words are heavy between them, and he says them with such…finality. A fresh wave of pain washes over Vex, and she sucks in a breath…and pushes her chin out stubbornly, squaring her shoulders.

“So did I,” she says. “If you belong here, then so do I. I’ll settle in.” She can tell, by the pain that flashes across his face, that she’s struck a nerve. It’s the most animated he’s looked since she got here.

“ _No_ ,” he says, emphatic, and, “No. It’s different. You weren’t _supposed_ to— You didn’t deserve what happened to you.” 

“Neither did you.”

“I did.” She knows him well enough to recognize the way his expression closes off. He’s trying to look…what does he think he’s playing at? Logic? Detachment? She knows him well enough to see the pain behind it, too. “That’s the thing, Vex. I _did_. Everything that happened to me, I caused with my own two hands. _I_ brought Orthax into the world. I carried him in my pocket for years. I drew Ripley’s eye, I built the guns that she…copied, and dissected, and spread like a disease. I _made_ her—“

“Are you her mother, then, or her father?” Vex cuts in, and he slashes a hand through the air, disregarding the interruption.

“—and _every time_ I tried to fix my mistakes, I only made them worse. They are so, so much bigger than me now, and the only thing I could hope to do is make it _worse still_. The best thing I can hope to do now is step away and hope the world will rebalance itself in my absence. This is absolutely what I deserve.”

“Do you think I’m stupid, Percival?” It comes out almost before he’s done, sharp like a slap. She stares defiantly into his face, and he has the decency to look surprised at least. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“What? _No_ ,” he says, and when she sees him take a breath to keep going, she speaks over him, running away with the conversation before he has a chance. Her words come out fast as a volley of arrows, landing _thud-thud-thud-thud._

“Do you think I’m ignorant? Foolish? Rash and greedy and unrefined? It’s because of some fatal flaw in my personality, isn’t it? Because I was made wrong? Don’t you think the opinions of a bastard child, an _unwanted daughter_ , are beneath you?” She leans heavy on Saundor’s words, even though they taste like ash in her mouth, and she sees him recognize them. Sees that he remembers them, too. Good. He reaches a hand out to her, and she bats it away, keeps going. “Do you think I should have given up years ago? Do you think it’s selfish to keep carving out a place for myself in a world that never asked for me? Do you think all my successes are pilfered from someone else? Someone more deserving? Should I give them back? Don’t you think I should stop embarrassing my father, own up to it all and die?”

“ _No_ ,” he gasps again, and finally it’s his turn to look horrified. He reaches out with both hands and clasps her by the shoulders and this time she lets him, but—

“ _Now you know how it feels!_ ” she screams. Right there, right in his face, so loud and so raw that the words rake at the inside of her throat. Percival is stunned…but his fingers, digging into her, feel solid. The edges of him look sharper than they did before. “Now imagine that every second word out of my mouth, every day of our _fucking lives_ , was more of the same. What’s for breakfast, I have mean eyes, how’s your project, I wasn’t ever supposed to be born, _will you pick up some twine for me at the store and by the way, I don’t think you’d really miss me if I disappeared—_ And no matter how many times you told me no, no, I said, _I don’t believe you!_ And I just kept— Tearing at myself and tearing at myself, and refusing help—And then I _destroyed_ myself with it, and the end of it all, and I left you _alone!_ ”

“It’s not the same!” he cries, exasperated, and she grabs him back, clutching at his forearms.

“Why!? Because your problems matter more than mine!? Because you’re more _Important_? Or is it because you think I’m too stupid to understand after all?” She quiets, there, just for a second, just to prove to him that he doesn’t have an answer. “It’s the same! It’s the same and it’s _selfish_ , it’s so _selfish_ to center your life around— Around that.. Masochistic self-gratification, the same way as it would be selfish to let— Drink, or gambling, or anything else push your loved ones out of your life. It’s _selfish_ to act like you’re the— Hero of some tragic novel, and covet that _stupid fucking idea_ above everything else, at the expense of everything else. You’re not a tragic story, Percival. You’re just a man. And if you want me to believe you when you talk my demons down, then you have to believe me, too.”

She winds down into silence, but she doesn’t look away from him, holding his gaze as the seconds…trickle…by. He doesn’t look sleepy any more. He doesn’t look distant. She thinks his eyes look wet. “…You don’t feel all those ways, about yourself,” he whispers, and she barks out a humorless laugh.

“I let feeling ‘all those ways’ keep me from being honest with the man I love for ages, because I didn’t want to believe him when he told me I was good enough,” she says. To say it comes out easy, after all this, would be an understatement. It’s more that she doesn’t think she could have held it back if she tried. She sees the shock on Percy’s face, and it still daunts her, but… “Then I almost missed my chance, and I couldn’t stand the thought of him going away without ever…knowing. So I decided I didn’t want to live that way any more.

“It’s not just about you, Percy,” she says, voice gentling, finally. “Or me. You’re not alone in the world, and your life isn’t the…poetic disaster you want it to be. So you…fucked some things up. All of us have. Out of all the people in the world, you are in the best company you could possibly be, in regards to fucking things up. And without you, all of us are lost. You _know that_. Deep down, you know it. We miss you, Percival. All of us…miss you. Terribly. If you go away, you’ll be punishing more than just yourself.”

He stares at her for a long moment, then heaves a great sigh, eyes fluttering shut. “…I acted a fool, didn’t I,” he murmurs.

“You did,” she agrees, simply, daring to hope this is progress, daring to hope he understands. “…And, here, how about this. I’ll make you a deal. If you really…need to lay your mistakes to rest…fine.” She reaches a hand out smooth gently at his shirt collar. Beneath, she feels warm flesh. Warmer than before, she thinks. “Lay them down here. That man, that Percy, is d—“ She chokes, suddenly, on the word. Her fingers hesitate on his collar…then move again as she fights through the pain. His eyes crack open- Watching her. “dead. Along with all his regrets, and all his mistakes. The Percy I bring back with me can be nice and fresh and…the kind of man who listens to the people that love him. Alright? You can be…reborn. Start fresh.”

The pause is longer this time, stretching out and out and out. His gaze is intense, and she can’t quite read his expression. When the quiet finally gets to her, when she starts to doubt again, she blurts, “…And anyway, you owe me money.”

It’s so…bizarre, so out of place that his eyes round, and he tips his head. “…I owe you…?” he repeats, and he sounds puzzled and so like himself, so like living, breathing Percy, that she finds she can’t regret the way her mouth ran away with her. “For what..?”

“I don’t know,” Vex says, and for some reason this, out of everything, is what breaks her. Her eyes mist over, and she sniffles, graceless and loud, feeling a watery smile curve her lips as she begins to cry. “I don’t know, I just— Come back, and I’ll think of something.”

She scrubs at her eyes, and when she looks back up at him, she finds him smiling. “Will you,” he says, and his voice is warm. “I can’t say I’m—“

That’s where the sound just…stops. His lips are still moving, but not a sound comes out. “Percy?” she gasps, and she can still hear herself, but that's all, like her ears are stuffed with cotton. His expression goes worried, and she clutches at a handful of his shirt just in time to feel something, some force start to drag him back. Away from her. “No,” she says, and “no,” again when his hands on her arms slip free, when the cloth in her hand is ripped from her desperate fingers. It looks like he’s shouting something as he’s dragged away, but she _can’t hear him_. She has time to think that she hopes, prays it’s Pike, getting ahold of him now that he's let his guard down.

And then the light goes out.

 

When she comes back to her body, she finds it sprawled across Percy. There’s no slow waking, no gentle return to consciousness. One moment, she’s clawing at Percival's shirt. The next, she’s slung across his body, face down with something hard biting into her chest. Her eyes are closed, and her first instinct is to open them. Her thoughts catch up with her before she does, though, and she keeps them shut, because…what if?

What if he didn’t come back with her?

Instead, she lays, and she…waits. Holds her breath, and listens, feels. The body beneath her is still.

 _No,_ she thinks. No. Not after all that. There’s no way, there’s no _way_ …She swallows the despair rising in her throat, and decides she won’t accept this. She will not, she simply _will not_ , and that is the end of it. 

Instead, she will wait right here until he comes back. Right...here. It won’t be long now. It can’t be. In fact, she’ll count it down. From…five. Yes, five sounds good. She’ll count down from five, and when she hits ‘one’, Percival will come back to life.

Five, she thinks.

Four.

Three.

(She slows down a little bit, leaving a longer pause before…)

Two.

…One.

 

Just below her ear, his heart begins to beat.


End file.
